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A College Without Microsoft?
An anonymous reader asks: "My grandfather is the president of a well-known undergraduate-only college of about 7,000 students. He tells me that an alumnus has agreed to donate $2.4 million initially (and up to $800,000 each succeeding year for 10 years) to the school for computer equipment and staff if the school agrees not to renew any contract and to buy no products or services (either directly or through an intermediary like Gateway) from Microsoft. I'm told that this isn't the enormous amount of money that it sounds like and that a change-over to non-Microsoft products would be costly. I think it'd be great for college students to use computers apart from Microsoft, but I'm told that the board will look at the decision in terms of cost, not for benefit to the students. Does the Slashdot community have any points that I can give my grandfather to present to the Board next month?"
OS X has proven to be a very stable OS and it gives you the UNIX underbelly to teach students how to program with free compilers, while at the same time maintaining an extreme ease of use for all computer skill levels.
Apple and OpenOffice would fill the void nicely in my opinion. It won't be as cheap as x86 by any means, but it could be easier to support and teach.
btw, this isn't a flame. I'm using Linux right now and I love it, but distributing it to total novices can be frustrating.
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How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
I'd like to meet this person. Anyway, as far as making the case for acceptance: Show the board MS License 6.0. Highlight the "good" parts, and append some of the better industry commentary about them. Make it clear that, if whatever academic licensing MS offers doesn't already include these provisions, it will soon. (A reasonable assumption.) Run some numbers on the projected TCO of M$ software over those ten years. Be sure to include some reasonable extrapolation of past losses due to viruses & such. Then run the same numbers for Linux. With a reasonable effort, you might well be able to demonstrate to the board a lower ten-year expenditure for a Linux environment before taking the donation into account. Might not succeed (esp. now that MS knows about the proposal - thanks /. [G]), but at worst you'll certainly get a cost-conscious board thinking about open source.
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Universities (i.e. locations where you get Bachelor degrees, not sure if they are called that in the U.S.)
An American I know told me that is the U.S., an institution is a college if it just offers Bachelor's degrees, and a university if it has Masters' programs.
#define sig "Every social system runs on the people's belief in it."
The words college and university are to some extent regionalisms. To some people the words are practically interchangeable. To others college implies "trade school" where specific trades are taught such as secretarial skills, engine repair, carpentry, and system administration.
Many CS and engineering programs have gone down the slippery path of Trade School were specifics are taught instead of general concepts. This has been discussed many many times on slashdot.
I'll bite. And start thinking like a PHB.
If I use Microsoft products (which are surprisingly stable as of late.), I can save myself thousands of dollars in human ressource since an MCSE is cheaper then an RHCE. If the RHCE tops out in the 6-figure realm I can theoretically hire me 3 MCSE to do the job to my servers, which by the way came equipped with the OS, thanks to the MS-TAX.
Now now, I know that linux is way more stable, allows me to do more with less, and that my RHCE will not have half the problems my MCSE have, but still. In PHB-land, the winner would be MS.
Now mod me into oblivion, and I'll go wash my hands after having typed so much pro-ms material.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
Your grandfather should look into MIT's implementation of information systems. There is virtually no reliance on MS yet complete choice for students. The IS implementation at MIT is really a beautiful thing. Too often schools fail to seek best practices before diving into new projects.
My university signed this thing with microsoft called 'Campus Agreement'. Basically it means they get MS software really cheap, almost free for the students, but tha catch is that this "Agreement" is exclusive. They're not allowed to work other similar liceses. This results classes about VB programming, where there used to be C++ and Pascal courses. This happened after I graduated, so I did enyoy learning a lot of different languages, but now, that's a thing of the past, thanks (again) to MS (or should I say M$?) As for my favorite language, C/C++, they could be using one of Borland's tools (C++ Builder, Kylix), but as a product of the agreement, they're stuck with the very inferior Visual C++.
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